Aurora Alert!

[JimFox]

If you have an Aurora App, that's the alert you get. And that is what I saw this past October while shooting fall colors with TimMC in Michigan. This is from Split Rock Lighthouse along the North shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota.

I have already posted a couple images from there, but while rushing through my photos to see what else I wanted to process before the year ends I looked through this folder and found another one that I liked. This one has a lot of colors, and the addition of some orange which I found pretty neat. Someone had mentioned before that it was light pollution, but I am not so sure. The orange pops up in some of the frames, but its not there in the beginning and it is not in the end, so I wonder if it somehow is from the aurora also?

I chose not to do any lens correction on the left side of the image, I would lose too much of the aurora colors to correct that. I notice it, and all of you will notice it, but a non photographer viewer won't even think twice about it. So I chose to leave it.

All comments are welcome,

Jim

 

[Ben Egbert]

This is beautiful. Was it visible to the naked eye?

 

[AlanLichty]

Definitely some colorful skies.

Did you crop some of this frame on the right? The left hand side distortion on the trees is almost disorienting with none visible on the right.

 

[Jameel Hyder]

Very colorful indeed.

 

[JimFox]

This is beautiful. Was it visible to the naked eye?

Thanks Ben. Nope, it wasn't visible to the eye. There was a brightness in the sky that after taking photos I realized corresponded to the green areas.

 

[MonikaC]

Those are some wild colors, Jim! Have you approached the distortion as you would keystoning?

 

[JimFox]

Definitely some colorful skies.

Did you crop some of this frame on the right? The left hand side distortion on the trees is almost disorienting with none visible on the right.

No cropping at all. This is just one of my images from the timelapses converted to a tiff instead of the jpg conversions I did for the timelapse. There is nothing on the right side but more of Lake Superior, so that wouldn't have made a difference. I am not feeling disoriented by the distortion on the left. And perhaps because I had to just accept it for the timelapse as there was no way I could afford to lose 1/4 of the image on the left in order for the lens distortion to be corrected, I just accepted it very early on.

As I mentioned about non-photographers, not a single one who has seen this has said a thing about some of the trees leaning on the edge. They don't even think twice about it. So that's where we as photographers have to remember sometimes who is our intended audience, and not fret over certain issues in a photograph that the viewing audience wouldn't even see. So I am sure I am already be biased on it, as in some photos I will notice it and be bothered, so I totally get if it bothers you.

 

[JimFox]

Those are some wild colors, Jim! Have you approached the distortion as you would keystoning?

Thanks so much Monika. That's how I approach all of my WA distortion. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[David S]

Incredible !! love the sweep of the colors from green to blue

 

[JimFox]

Incredible !! love the sweep of the colors from green to blue

Thanks Dave! I appreciate that!

 

[Mike Lewis]

Really fantastic Jim - love this one. The range of sky colors is amazing - but for those of us lucky enough to have seen aurora firsthand, certainly believable. It is always really cool to see what the camera sensor can pull out that the eye simply cannot discern.

ML